Well, to understand where I am coming from, you have to understand how modern National Brand marketing departments work. People have this image of some big exec with a sitcom staff of handsome and cute twenty somethings placing ads and having fun, but the reality is that there is now really just a core of two people, the CFO and Marketing VP, supported by what amounts to a bunch of I/T nerds with MIS/Accounting degrees. The skill in being a top notch Marketing VP is in building a marketing organization out of other organizations, everything is contracted out these days, it allows a savvy VP to get the best mix and it also gives him the ability to change that mix at will based on current conditions. Here is a great example of these kinds of organizations that make up today's corporate marketing mix:
http://www.allied-media.com/hispanic market/hispanic market research.html
We all know Hispanics are the hot market, but a Marketing VP isn't going to run out and hire some sharp kids from East LA, he's going to write a check to those guys. Today's Marketing Departments are really just a mix of those kinds of targeting organizations.
The other guy, the CFO, his job is to write big fat checks. His fat checks filter thru these organizations like the one above, eventually reaching you Radio Gods at your particular Olympus as they attempt to use you to hit the particular segment they want to reach. The CFO doesn't like to write checks to black holes, he wants two things from the VP, a prediction on his Return on Investment before he spends the bread, and an analysis of how it all worked out after he's spent it, information which then is fed back into the loop for the next go round. The marketing staff prepares reports for the VP telling him what his organizational mix should be based on current trends. For the CFO, they prepare predictive models, analyze surveys, and then come up with an ROI report for the CFO and tell him what he can expect for his money, and it better be three pages or less, or someone is going to looking for a job. One of the key factors that is included in the report is the Risk Analysis. With the dawn of the Internet and now the Social Media Age, new risks to marketing investment have arisen that will obviously lead, IMO, to the end of "Shock Jock" radio. Before the Internet/SMA, all your marketing targets lived in their own little bubble, and your two main targets of mass marketing, were Joe Sixpack and June Cleaver, everything else were niche targets, and anything content-wise said in those niches never really got mass exposure to the other segments.
That world has come and gone. Now anything said on one segment is subject to the people we can call Internet Stormtroopers (something the Left is way ahead of the Right on BTW). Let's take Limbaugh's gaffe as an example: he makes his idiot remarks that make him sound like a total dope who doesn't realize women use birth control pills for other reasons than his claim they need them for gang-banging the men's dorm, they use them to control severe menstrual problems and other serious medical problems as well - in the old days, it would have been ha-ha, funny Rush, we all know those lefty girls are all sluts, wink wink. Well, Rush's remark get packaged into a Youtube vid of a balding, late middle aged, misogynist sneering into his microphone, and the National Organization for Women then sends it out in hot red outrage to their Stormtrooper contingent of say, 500,000 true believers, into their email and Facebook walls and whatever else, and as they send it to the three people they know, etc, etc do the math, now millions of women are screaming bloody outrage and it's become big news on the old TV, and next thing you know, 80 million women are seriously pissed off. Now, let's say I'm a CFO, and I just got a letter from Mediamatters and NOW, telling me that their Stormtroopers are going to be letting everyone know I ran an ad for my restaurant chain right when Rush was jamming his foot into his mouth, and I'm getting angry letters from women asking why I am paying Rush to call them sluts, and hey, do the math, the 20 million Rush listeners who heard my ad, which my marketing dept told me will result in 5% of them heading for my restaurant, well, once compared to the millions of women who are now going to tell Dad we are eating somewhere else, like forever, you get the point: ROI= - ($100,000,000). Now tell me, what do you think my Risk Analysis is going to say next time the subject of advertising on a political show is going to say?
Beck and Stern are the smart guys, they are both now in pay-wall bubbles where they can say their most outrageous schtick to idiots who pay to hear it only. Beck learned it the hard way with his "Obama's a racist" remark, even with great ratings the risk to Fox's bottom line just became to great, so they fired him. There's a lesson in that. Welcome to the new reality. And once you give it some thought, you'll also realize why Romney lost the election - AM radio lost it for him with their war on Hispanics and their 1950's view of women's rights, which bled out of their bubble like slaughtered pigs.
